The key for me is to wait until you receive money and it clears before starting work. My 2009 disaster was basically 5 figures of outstanding unpaid invoices from 3 companies I had to sue in order to get payment, and when I had judgements against them they filed for bankruptcy protection.

If you insist on extending credit, come up with a number that you won't exceed under any circumstance until a company pays you.

Most companies I find much prefer using either checks or direct bank deposits. There accounts team see Paypal as a headache and like to avoid it.

As the others have said never do any work for someone unless their down payment has cleared and/or there is a signed legally binding agreement specifying their payment terms. If you put yourself out there in a position to get screwed over it will happen!

But seriuosly. Look into plimus, or getting a merchant account from authorize.net (they allow checks also). Both of these are going to have monthly service charges. My authorize.net is around $80 for everything each month

Never ever do credit with anyone before you do the work. Unless you are monied enough to start chasing the payment. Most companies that I work with pay using checks, an invoicing system but never paypal. I guess paypal is for IMers and small business. But corporates won't consider it. As for billing and invoicing them, I use open ERP which is just great and integrates with my bank, paypal and other payment systems.

I use Freshbooks & and Merchant account. Freshbooks sort of acts as a gateway to paypal and as far as I know you don't have to have paypal to pay via CC through ppal. Merchant account is great though, because I don't have to worry about ppal stealing my money.

the folks that make Quickbooks has a payment service very much like paypal and
the fee is only .50 per transaction! that is it!

I think until your acct is verifyed they cap you at 5k per transaction.

You just send your client an email and the system take care of the rest.

Here is some of what the new service can do:

1) Custom Pay Link

a. As a small business, you now have the ability to create a custom link so your customers can pay you online. You can insert the link in your QuickBooks statements, web page, social page, emailed invoices, etc. To use this new feature, sign in to IPN and click on the 'Custom Payment Link' tab on the left.

2) Recurring payments and payment requests

a. You now have the option of setting recurring monthly and weekly payments or payment requests from IPN.

b. Manage your recurring schedules by going to the 'Recurring Payments' tab on the left.

3) Variable eCommerce

a. You can now create variable price eCommerce buttons to place on your website in addition to fixed price eCommerce buttons. When you add a new button from your â€˜eCommerce buttons' tab in IPN , leave the price field blank to create a variable price button.

I use Freshbooks with Authorize.net. I would say 80% of my clients do the autodraft option for recurring payments. However, I ALWAYS get a paper check and signed agreement when I close the deal in person. Then, put them on autodraft.

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